Contemplative Collaboration is one of the tools I utilize when working with groups. This approach to facilitating the collaborative process involves a significant increase of the participant’s consciousness and includes the full range of human sensory awareness: Feelings, sensations, sounds, ideas, patterns – both positive and negative -emerge in a field of perception and are sustained for long periods of time. Holding open this field of awareness, reveals deep and often hidden potential that is cloaked in the comfort zone of normal group functioning.
How this context of receptivity is achieved, involves the cultivation of ancient methodologies for opening awareness to specific mental faculties of concentration, mindfulness, compassion and empathy. These qualities of individual attention inform the psycho-social context and maintains a climate of incubation allowing impulses and ideas to emerge. Not only does the individual hold and facilitate his or her own ideas and impulses – he or she is guided to remain open to the ideas and impulses of the other participants in an environmental consciousness.
Two reasons innovations fail:
1) “[There is} a failure to let ideas grow . . . Ideas are like plants - the seeds don't look much like the final flower, and need time and nurturing to blossom. If there's no incubator in an organization, there's no way for new seeds to develop, and therefore, not much innovation is going to happen.
2) [There is] an unwillingness to take risks. ”
(Perfetti, Christine. July 26, 2007. Debunking the Myths of Innovation: An Interview with Scott Berkun )
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I have been experimenting with Google Groups. It has provided a great platform for collaboration. I have also tried this tool for some social media outlets as well, with some success.
http://roihunters.wordpress.com/2008/09/09/google-groups-team-collaboration-tool/